AMD’s 5 GHz Turbo CPU in Retail: The FX-9590 and ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Review
by Ian Cutress on August 9, 2014 8:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks: Comparing Motherboards
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things – better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal), at the expense of heat and temperature, but also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk which is clearly visible, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the purchase.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
The FX-8150 result for the Extreme9 compared to other motherboards shows one of two things - the latest Windows SP1 with core parking updates has an effect, or the BIOS is more efficient at handling turbo modes than our older reviews.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Budburnicus - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Umm you KNOW that even stock clocked that the i7-3770K is better and faster in EVERY way, than the 9590 OCed to the max, right?You also know that while you saved, literally, a couple bucks on BUYING your hardware - you are going to spend, comparatively, hundreds of dollars more running it for even 2 years!
Oh then there is the effect that the HUGE power draw has on components - mobos, PSUs, video cards, RAM - because ALL of it gets effected by the insane heat - and certainly ALL of it will be effected if you short your PSU!
And i7-3770K at stock frequencies out performing this POS FX 9590 - is NOT synthetic! That is real world PROVEN speed! NTM, you can EASILY hit 4.7 GHz on any SandyBridge chip - which will not only yield MUCH better performance, but will suck less power and be more reliable as well! And you aren't even going to have to spend that much to buy a good Z77 board and an i5/i7 2500k/2600k (ASRock Z77 Extreme 4 runs right around $100 right now, and is FAR from any budget board, and in fact has more features than ANY FX board that could run this 220W POS!)
So pat yourself on the back, you saved a few bucks on hardware! BUT you completely sacrificed ALL performance, and ANY reasonable upgradability! Also, you will end up paying FAR more than you saved in power costs! (I am sure your power company will thank you for choosing an AMD space heater for a CPU!)
Well on that note, you may save a few bucks on heating, given you live somewhere that gets colder than 50 degrees (Fahrenheit) at some point in the year anyway.
Budburnicus - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
LMAO! Cult - you are such an AMD fanboy NOOB! It is not a cult when PERFORMANCE and EFFICIENCY are the deciding factors!And again, you saved a few bucks when buying your already outdated POS AMD space heater - just wait til that power bill comes!
And if you seriously cannot afford an i5/i7 K processor, even a Sandy or Ivy Bridge, and a Z77 or newer chipset, what the hell good is faster ram and an SSD going to do you? None, unless your workload is entirely composed of highly multi threaded compression/encoding etc.
Have fun with your 220W space heater that has to compete against i3 CPUS! LMFAO!
Budburnicus - Saturday, January 10, 2015 - link
Just another instance of AMD CHUGGING power and crapping performance! Combine this FLOP of a chip (220 W TDP - sweet Jesus! At STOCK) with an R9 290X (300 W TDP, again holy sh*t!) and you are up to over 500 watts TDP!Compare this to an Intel i7-5930K (140 W TDP) paired with a GTX 970 (148 W TDP) and you are ONLY at 288!
Not ONLY that, but the Intel is faster BY FAR at stock speeds, as well the GTX 970, while costing only $30 more - provides ~10%-25% frame rates in basically EVERY benchmark!
I just feel sad for AMD anymore... I am guessing they are too busy with owning ATI and TRYING to compete with SandyBridge and newer Intel products (My i7-2600K beats this FX chip at STOCK speeds in most benchmarks - and basically ALL gaming benchmarks! And that is not even mentioning that the 2600K easily hits 4.4 GHz on any decent mobo/chipset! Then there is the fact that the 2600K is THREE years old, only 95 W TDP - which will NEVER go above 125 even at the 4.7 GHz/102.3 Bclock OC I run!)
AMD should have realized this Chip's Architecture was DOA with the first PileDriver CPUs falling FAR behind the Phenom 2 1100Ts! And even now the 1100Ts generally have better gaming performance!
The REAL question is, WHY? Why have they not dropped this design and brought us a new one? I mean they could try it with limited releases to test it at VERY least, but I hear no word whatsoever about AMD being anywhere close to a completely new chip design!
I was a staunch "AMD Fan-boy" back in the Pentium 4/Athlon XP days! They WERE far better! Also back then ATI could actually compete in gaming!
Now? AMD is only good for budget gaming builds - parts like this FX chip are just about pointless - apart from people who already own a good socket AM3+ mobo. But buying this chip for a breand new build? That would be a HORRIBLE idea! Only the biggest fans of AMD would waste such money and power..
And AMD VideoCards - yes they have better compute performance - so yeah, if you are still GPU mining new Crypto's (Like VertCoin's Lyra2RE Algorithm) - buy an AMD GPU, but 2 or 3 if that is your goal! But even then, apparently the HD 7000 series are STILL the best miners, as they do not consume INSANE amounts of power and do NOT run at a "SAFE 95 deg C" (AMD's quote on R9 290X operating temp!) So, whereas Nvidia and Intel move forward with less power consumption, cooler temps, and better performance where it matters, it REALLY seems AMD is taking steps backwards!
SviatA - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
So this motherboard suits basically for those who will overclock the processor, graphics and RAM.Honestly, I don't know why would any purchase a AM3+-based motherboard since we have to wait for eight months only to get some AMD Zen processors that are (at least on paper) much better than FX. So, I am thinking about the new motherboard and a new processor. Since Doom 4 will come out next year, will have to get something better than my current configuration, that is based on the ASRock 970 R2.0 (BTW, this is a pretty good MB, have bought it here - http://hardware.nl/asrock/970-extreme3r20.html almost two years ago and happy with it)
Beljim - Saturday, January 9, 2016 - link
Do not buy from Asrock. You will be on your own.
I bought an Extreme9 just before Christmas 2015. Went to raid my 2 Crucial 512gb SSDs and computer would not see them. Called Asrock tech and they told me certain makes of SSDs are not compatible with Extreme9 boards. I explained that SSDs were much older and Asrock board should be backwards compatable. He gave me a short list of drives that were compatible and said I'd have to buy new drives. Asrock took no responsibility and were in no way helpful.
paradonym - Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - link
Where's the described M.2 Slot? Ctrl+F'ing the manual for M.2 doesn't shows up any point.